“Some people are worth melting for.” —Olaf, in Frozen

Greetings Dear Ones!

Whew! We’ve survived the last ten weeks—the darkest weeks in the Northern Hemisphere. It feels like ten years. The Lunar New Year starts today. (Happy New Year!) Ancient Celtic Imbolc/St. Brigid’s Day is Saturday—midway between Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. The Light is on its way! In Ireland, they celebrate by having a public holiday—“a festival of renewal, fire, and fertility.” (Prudence rolls her eyes and shudders.) Here in America, especially in Punxsutawney Pennsylvania, people celebrate the cross quarter change of season by dressing warmly, listening to accordion bands and flugelhorns, and fortifying themselves with hot beverages while they await the prognostication of a well-fed rodent.

Here in Vermont, things look brighter already—in fact, they look a dazzling white. It’s 23F degrees, which is practically toasty compared to some of the recent temperatures. The trees look like they had a pillow fight in the night. Fresh feathered flakes flutter. Vermont is wearing one of her magnificent bridal gowns full of sparkles. Someone made whipped cream in the overturned bowl of the sky. Exhalations hang in the air like frosty promises.

I am fitting a pair of pants to a new customer. She is a traveling nurse here from Florida. “How do you like Vermont?” I ask.

“I LOVE Vermont,” she gushes, “It’s just the cold…brrr…. I can’t get used to it. It goes right to your bones.”

“Well, it’s NOT bikini season,” mutters Prudence, launching into her favorite mantra: “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.”

“Vermont wouldn’t be Vermont without the cold,” I say. “I for one am extremely grateful for the cold right now. My dear little dog died last month and since the ground was too hard to dig a grave to bury him, I put him in my deep freeze with last summer’s blueberry harvest to await a good spring thaw. Only, I adopted a bunch of semi-feral cats who seem to have disturbed the electric wire to the plug and unplugged the freezer and the poor dog defrosted. Just this morning, I had to run through my house with his soggy box, and get him outside and into the nearest snow bank as fast as I could. Thankfully, he’s a good, solid pup-sicle again.”

I finish pinning her and look up at her face. This customer is staring at me with wide eyes. I cannot tell if she is delighted or horrified.

She shivers. “That….that… is SUCH a Vermont story,” is all she can say.

“Really?” I ask. “Are you telling me Floridians never use their larger household appliances as temporary pet morgues? Ever? I would think it would be even more necessary to keep them cold in that heat—they would start to decompose so rapidly.”

She laughs. “I’m pretty sure you can bury a dog any day you want in Florida.”

“Hmmm,” I muse. “I had no idea. I guess it makes sense if your ground never freezes. Still, it’s not something they mention in the tourist brochures.”

“I’m telling you, that is a VERMONT story,” she says chuckling. She has that happy look of a traveler in a foreign land who has just had an ethnic experience she was seeking. Like a Scotsman eating haggis for his evening tea, I have unwittingly obliged the tourist.

I think about it for the rest of the day—how those who live in a place become shaped by its weather—not just physically but mentally and spiritually too. I think about how many farmers here dig a large pit in the autumn in case any of their livestock don’t survive the winter. (I take grim solace in the knowledge that your average Jack Russell can fit in a crisper drawer.) I think about what a gift hard Winter is to Grief and how here, even the rituals surrounding death must be suspended and given time. Grief and Winter go well together. I like that some things get stripped to their bare essence, like trees and mountaintops, and other things get covered over, enveloped in soft layers of wool until they are unrecognizable, like sheep and people who have not stuck to their New Year’s resolutions. I like that we know where to seek the nuggets of warmth—in a pocket, around a tea cup, in a smile. I like treating the air vents in the truck like they are tiny campfires. In the way that the darkness highlights any kind of light, the cold makes of us all seekers of heat.

Being Frozen, “on ice,” is a form of delay, not denial. But it gives us something precious—Time. Time to adjust to loss. Time to plan and be reverent.

“Just how reverent is it to run screaming through one’s house with a box dripping defrosted dog juices on the carpets?” asks Prudence snidely. “He just needed one last shot at those carpets, didn’t he?”

“Hush, Prudence,” I say. “This little chap deserves a proper send off. We’ll give him a grand wake and a proper burial. He’ll get wrapped in a blanket and put to bed in the earth with his favorite food and a pillow of flowers.”

“Well, he’s emerged too soon and didn’t see a shadow,” says Prudence briskly. “As soon as you get that freezer cleaned out, back he goes. It’s six more weeks of winter for him!”

In another “Vermont” kind of story, I love those tender frozen moments with the cattle when I put my cheek against their necks and they curl their heads around me like a hug. I reach up and put gloved hands into their cold, hairy ears and scratch gently. We would not stand thus in sweaty, stinky, fly season. We hold each other quietly, me within the circle of a coiled neck, until our individual inner warmths can reach and touch each other and we feel the exchange of heat. It’s an amazing thing to have one’s skin register the heat of another animal as you each warm every barrier between you both. It’s the bovine version of a cat on your lap. (These two guys would be lap cattle if they could!) They eat from a giant round bale of hay in a feeder in the field. There is no reason for them to trot expectantly to the barn each evening at feeding time, except that they are reporting for hugs. Hugs are a different kind of food for those who live in deep cold.

At this time of year, it can get very exciting to look at seed catalogues and to plan the garden (especially since you may recently have lost last year’s gleanings in a certain feline-related freezer incident). As soon as it is 39F degrees, we will be out there in our t-shirts tilling and toiling and counting our chickens before they are hatched. (Goodness knows we need to hatch a lot of chickens!) We will get very busy very quickly. There are dogs and seeds and grievances to bury. There are vines to cut and trees to save and the annual milking of the Maple trees to do.

But it’s definitely not yet time to put away the woolens. (Talk to me in July.) Winter asks us to harden off a little more. To Wait. To be still and shiver a little. A bit of pruning is all we can do. We can’t just bury our old dogs or problems any time we want. Sometimes we need to sit with them until the ground beneath the apple tree is ready to receive them. Sometimes, it’s good to sit with a frozen hurt until you are ready to move on. (Unless, of course, you discover it is leaking—then run for the nearest snowbank!) I love that Nature dictates the pace. Someday, there will be honeybees and apple blossoms and the velvet of the earth will be scraped back then and our worn out little Loves will find a permanent resting place. We will turn then, and plant something New.

This is that hour before the dawn, where we curl our toes in anticipation of What Is To Come. But it’s not time to get up yet. A minute longer, stay in that warm pocket of flannel. You have time to lie still. Breathe… Wait… Listen…. Enjoy the cold that makes Life worth savoring. It’s a Vermont Story.

Wishing all you Dear Menders, wherever you may be, clean freezers, cozy corners, and healing Rest from all your Good Work. Don’t thaw out too soon!

With Sew Much Love,

Nancy

P.S. Thanks to all of you who wrote last week inquiring if the customer ever got her pants. I haven’t called to check but knowing the dear people involved, I assume so. People here are so kind—yet another Vermont Story….